The world's best World of Warcraft Mythic Plus dungeon-running restoration druid has a few thoughts about how Blizzard Entertainment could up its game.

Yesterday, the company announced updates and changes to its Mythic Dungeon International competition (including a new name), and I interviewed lead game designer Morgan Day about those changes and the company's approach to designing these high-level, five-man dungeon experiences in WoW. More than half of all maximum-level players in World of Warcraft participate in Mythic Plus dungeons, he said.

Today, I'm following up with a recent interview with J.B. "Jdotb" Daniel to get the high-end player perspective. He's a restoration druid on Method's North American Mythic Plus team, popular streamer, and possibly the world's best authority on M+ dungeons from a healing point of view. We talked about advice for Mythic Plus players, the good and bad of current dungeon design, and where Daniel expects Mythic Plus competition to go.

Heather Newman: Do you have advice for folks that are looking into pushing keys themselves for the first time, or trying to pull a group together with some friends and really start to think about Mythic Plus strategically?

J.B. Daniel: A very common question in [my] stream is, "How do I find people to play with?" I guess maybe the unfortunate answer is, you gotta do the pickup group experience. You gotta get out there and you gotta open up the Looking for Group tool and you gotta meet people. There are no shortcuts to that. A lot of times, it's hard to find ... As with every endgame sort of mode in World of Warcraft, ultimately you have to find other like-minded players, and those don't grow on trees.

Newman: So how do you go about finding good players to run with?

Daniel: There are some resources you can use. There are some Discord channels out there. It's almost disingenuous for me to give this advice, because I've been removed from that sort of community for a while of trying to pick up groups.

But ultimately you're gonna have to meet people in an MMO. They're gonna be strangers at first. You're gonna play with them. It might be kinda awkward. But eventually, that's how you make new friends, is you just get out there in the Looking for Group tool, group up with four other strangers. If they're good, keep playing with them. If they're bad, don't.

Eventually there'll be enough guys you add to your friends list, you're able to start making your own groups, and you'll get comfortable enough with them to jump into Discord. That's when the Mythic Plus experience truly unlocks, is when you get a group that's in voice chat discussing things, strategizing things, and you've got that continuity and you can build upon previous gameplay sessions with each other. and you start to get to know each other's tendencies.

Really, that's what keeps anyone coming back to an MMO. If any MMO was a single-player game, everyone would quit playing it within a month because you just get tired of it. What keeps everyone coming back to MMOs is the people they meet, the friends they make. That is no different for Mythic Plus than any other format in World of Warcraft. You're gonna have to get out there and meet people. You won't like all of them, but you'll like some of them. You'll have to put in time. Eventually you'll meet the right people. If you keep playing long enough, you'll meet the right people and you'll form a group, and you'll have a lot of fun doing it. That I can promise.

Newman: How did you get into doing Mythic Plus competition?

Daniel: We started doing keys back when [the expansion] Legion started, and I think everyone at that point did keys just for artifact power and gear. Maybe there were a few people that took it kind of seriously as a challenge. But for the first six or nine months of Legion, it was just Maw of Souls 30 times a day, and get as much AP and gear out of it as you can.

It never occurred to anyone that I was playing with that you should go higher on a key than it was strictly necessary to get maximum artifact power and gear. And just that was enough, I was playing 12 hours a day doing just that with other people. I think the community was kind of content. We were weird, but we enjoyed it.

It wasn't until the first MDI was announced that it really dawned on anyone like, "Oh, wow, I guess, yeah, you could do a key above ten, and there'd be a reason to do it." And so after the first MDI happened, I think the community went, "Hey, we should start pushing these keys higher and really challenge ourselves." And that was around the same time that the new loot system was introduced to give you proportionally better loot for going higher instead of just trying to go as fast as you could on lower keys.

Newman: What made you start streaming them?

Daniel: We started forming these groups of guys that knew what they were doing and really had that goal of pushing higher. That was when I linked up with Shakib, because we both play all day every day and kind of started making groups with that in mind. Once we saw the success of the first MDI, we were kind of in a unique position where there weren't many other people doing the high keys and especially not streaming it.

And so went, "Hey, let's just stream this and see if anybody likes it." It turned out there was kind of a hole there. There were some guys that were in the EU doing it, but nobody really on the North American side. And so the attention we got from that was like, "Oh, wow. There's actually an appetite from the community for us to watch the high keys and that people actually want to see how this is done and are curious how we do it."

Newman: So what do you think draws the audience to the Mythic Plus dungeons? Is it the fact that folks feel like they can relate, that they've done these dungeons before, or what is it that's bringing people in?

Daniel: I think there's a few things. I think the five-man experience is very relatable. If you haven't been in a leading-edge progression guild, you can watch 20 guys out there doing a thing, and you can kind of understand what's going on, but unless you've been in that, it's a whole ecosystem that's not familiar. But with the five-man dungeons, I think it's all pretty straightforward: You pull a bunch of enemies and blow them up as fast as you can. And it's pretty obvious when there's a failure, because someone dies. And so I think it's easier to digest from the viewer perspective.

I think it's a more common thing. I think everyone has done a five-man dungeon. And if you've done a five-man dungeon, you kind of feel like you know what you're watching when you watch us.

Newman: What do you think has contributed to the popularity of Mythic Plus in Warcraft as a whole?

Daniel: There was a good hook in the game to get people to go do it. It was sort of bite size content. You never spent more than, unless your group is wiping over and over, you never spent more than 20 or 30 minutes in a dungeon. You didn't have to find that many people to do it. The barrier to entry was low, and the rewards were good. And then once they had sort of experienced that themselves, then they see other people start doing it, and then they're kind of going, "I'll watch this guy because, hey, I want to see if there's a better way to do this dungeon than we've been doing it."

You know, a lot of times it's hard to crib strategies from arenas or from raids because the stuff is so high level and in arena it depends on who you're playing. In a raid, it depends a lot of times on very detailed, hard to convey strategies. But a lot of times in these five-man dungeons, it's very easy to go, "Oh, wow. I didn't even think about that -- that group just stealthed past that pack of mobs. My group could do that." It takes me one minute to explain that to my group.

A Method Dungeon Tools screen shot showing groups of enemies and which ones the party will attack.Method

Newman: How have tools for Mythic Plus changed since Legion?

Daniel: I think there's been a couple of things that have come out that have really pushed the evolution of Mythic Plus from the community side. The first thing, Raider.io, jumped into that role of tracking what's happening in Mythic Plus, and then created a system and eventually an add-on in game that tracks the achievements of players in dungeons. Now it's not just let's get gear and AP from it, it was let's try to push our Raider.io score up. There's been a lot of frustration in the community about that, because people feel left out with an add-on like RaiderIO, but it did a lot to push the high end of Mythic Plus and have a measurable goal for players to try to achieve.

Obviously there's been Method Dungeon Tools. There's been effort from the WeakAura community to make Mythic-Plus-specific WeakAuras, and [Deadly Boss Mods] and LittleWigs have more focus on making sure that they have good support for five-man dungeons. I think the sophistication has gone way up at the top level.

Newman: Do you think that Mythic Plus is at the adoption level now where some of the things that have been codified as part of add-ons or WeakAuras should be something that Blizzard considers putting into the base UI?

Daniel: When I first saw Method Dungeon Tools, I was blown away by what it could do. My first thought was, "I can't even believe you can put this in game. This is so cool." And then the second thought immediately following that was, "This needs be in the game for everyone. This is what the dungeon journal should be."

Every player should have this information all the time and in game. They shouldn't have to search for this on a website. This shouldn't be something you have to download an add-on for. This should be the level of detail that exists in the default UI, so that you can see these things on the map and know where they are, and know what they do, and not have to go searching for this information in other places. Because I think it would be revolutionary to the dungeon experience to have that level of information.

Newman: Are there other ways that Blizzard better support the Mythic Plus community?

Daniel: It's one of those deals where it's easy to be on the outside looking in and say, "Here's all the things I think should change." And I'm sure there's a lot that's happening on the inside. I do think Blizzard has been much better this expansion than last expansion about being proactive with editing things in the Mythic Plus scene that are problematic.

The first day that Grievous came out in beta, I think everyone tried it and was like, "This is terrible. There's no way that we can do keys with this Grievous affix." And I think within 24 hours, there was a nerf to Grievous on beta. And then on live, you saw similar changes to Explosive, like the first week Explosive came out and everyone was like, "Oh, this is terrible, I can't do keys like this." And within the week, Explosive has been nerfed. And then Grievous comes back and community's again kind of going, "Wow, we need to pair this with Tyrannical. This is insane." And Blizzard comes out and tweaks some stuff in it.

I think there could still be more work made there, but it's very encouraging to see. That level of input, I think, from Blizzard in terms of willingness to change things and speed at which they get changed.

A player makes his feelings about Grievous clear at the Mythic Dungeon Invitational All-Stars.Blizzard Entertainment

Newman: Is this this different than the approach in Legion?

Daniel: In terms of willingness to change things and speed at which they get changed, that didn't exist in Legion. The dungeon affixes got released at the beginning of the expansion, and then they stayed the same way until there was the introduction of the new affixes, I think in Nighthold. Then every time a new dungeon would get released, that dungeon might get nerfed a few times after it came out. But you just didn't really see much change other than sort of between content cycles.

Whereas in [the Battle for Azeroth expansion] there's been, I think, much more work by Blizzard from a day-to-day, week-to-week perspective to make sure that things are working better. I think there's still a lot of work that can be done with respect to some of the affixes, like the parity between affixes. Some of them seem much more difficult than others. Some of the dungeons seem more difficult than others. Some of the bosses seem more difficult than others. But it's encouraging, at least, to see the willingness by Blizzard to now be more engaged with making those changes, even if I don't necessarily agree with all the changes that are being made so far.

Newman: Talk a little bit about that. Are there affixes that you feel are particularly well-designed? Are there affixes that you find more problematic, and why?

Daniel: I've talked about affixes that introduce unavoidable damage to a key, which is essentially Grievous and Quaking, and to a lesser extent, Explosive. A lot of these boss fights in dungeons have clearly been tuned independent of the affixes. A lot of these boss fights are very enjoyable and challenging and feel right when you just take away the affixes from the key.

I think every affix should be a thing that simply changes mechanically the way you do the dungeon. It shouldn't produce more unavoidable damage. With Explosive, sometimes you get overrun and you're gonna take damage no matter what. But you can at least stop the damage if you kill the orb. With Grievous and Quaking, the damage just shows up. There's nothing you can do about it.

I don't think any of the dungeons were balanced around that, and there's no way to balance around that. Because either you balance around those affixes existing, and then if those affixes don't exist then the dungeons are easy. And if you don't balance around the damage existing, then when you start trying to push high keys and that damage shows up, then you just hit a wall where this fight does 20 percent more damage with these affixes than it does with any other set of affixes, and now I'm stuck doing 18s on this when I could be doing 20s of it on any other week.

Newman: Are there other affixes you like or don't like?

Daniel: I'd like to see a move away from affixes that are just like, "Here's damage. Figure out what you're gonna do with it." Some of these affixes are kind of joke, like Volcanic, like Skittish. They don't really change the way you do a key at all. In fact, you can pretty easily forget that they exist week to week. But some of these affixes, like Bursting, that's something that introduces an interesting mechanic to the dungeon.

Newman: Blizzard has said that the BfA dungeons were designed with Mythic Plus in mind. Are you seeing that playing out in these dungeons compared to your experience in Legion?

Daniel: No. That's a thing I've complained about. I think the affixes this time around were essentially copy-pasted from Legion, and Legion was a very different environment from BfA. With gear swapping, you could tailor your gear to each boss fight, which allowed you to adapt more easily in the middle of a dungeon. [Ed. note: Players can no longer change gear in a single Mythic Plus dungeon.] Just the way tanks are taking more damage now, doing less self-healing. I think healer mana is tighter in BfA than it ever was in Legion.

There's a whole different sort of meta in BfA, and yet you have the same affixes that have essentially just been ported over from Legion. Some of them just don't seem to fit at all.

Grievous was super over-tuned when it was first released. Explosive was super over-tuned when it was first released. They may have been considered conceptually when designing the dungeons, but I don't think there was any serious playtesting that was done, because I feel like those issues would've been flagged immediately by anyone who stepped foot in a high-level key. Doing Grievous or Explosive, you would've spent 10 minutes in there and gone, "Wow, this is almost unplayable."

Newman: How much of that is due to the extremely high level of keys that you're doing?

Daniel: I really don't feel like the dungeons were designed with Mythic Plus in mind. Actually, I wouldn't even necessarily have a problem with that if Blizzard hadn't indicated that they were gonna be. Because truthfully, the high-level Mythic Plus community is very small, very niche. There's not that many people doing the dungeons at a high enough level where you're gonna see that matter.

As someone who's participated at a high level on pretty much every facet of World of Warcraft, it's the same complaint that you get in every community, which is that the game's not tuned around players at the high level. It's tuned around the casual players. That's probably the way it should be as a business model. You're not making money from the high-level guys, and you're not getting subscription numbers from the high-level guys, and you don't necessarily care if you drive them off. You gotta make sure you keep your base.

From a more casual perspective, I don't know if there's anything different about BfA than Legion in terms of the playability. I don't know that casual players feel a whole lot different about the dungeons in BfA than they did in Legion. But from a high level, I would say the only change from Legion to BfA that I feel like was specifically made for Mythic Plus was that it feels like there are many less one-shot abilities from bosses. For that, I am grateful. But otherwise, in terms of the affixes, the way the bosses were designed, the way dungeons were designed, I don't feel like there was anything that was done with Mythic Plus in mind.

J.B. 'Jdotb' Daniel with his game face on.Blizzard Entertainment

Newman: You had mentioned the idea that perhaps some more extensive playtesting might have helped surface these kinds of responses early on. Is this something where you'd like to see Blizzard do more in beta?

Daniel: That's the thing. I think there was plenty of playtesting. I don't know how much feedback there was; obviously, playtesting without any feedback is essentially worthless. I know there were a bunch of guys doing keys on beta at a high level. I don't know that they made any attempt to give any feedback. I don't know that the developers made any attempt to tap into that. So that may have just been simply two completely isolated groups. The people actually doing the keys and the people balancing them just may have never gotten in sync.

I think there was plenty of time on beta for these issues to be unearthed. Now why they didn't get addressed is a separate matter, but I know people were doing them and experiencing the frustration, and maybe just not communicating that effectively. As long as beta is out long enough for every affix combination to show up one time ... maybe you need to shorten the cycles. Maybe instead of doing the natural weekly thing, maybe on beta you just need to have a different affix combination every day or something, so that you can make sure that all those get playtested in a timely fashion.

Newman: Why don't you think players would universally report issues they had on beta?

Daniel: I think there's this sort of expectation from players on beta that if they're doing a thing, that there's some omnipotent developer watching everything they're doing, and if Explosive is terrible, then someone'll notice this at Blizzard. Nah, man. If that's your experience, you have to tell that to someone. Someone needs to be pinged on that.

But I don't know that beta necessarily gave a really clear way for players to do that. I don't know that it was like, "Yeah, click this box and type in what your issues are." It may just need to be a better system of making clear how players are to give the feedback that I think could've avoided this.

Newman: You're quoted as saying that you were going to try and trigger as many dungeon bugs as you could during the final exhibition rounds of Mythic Dungeon Invitational-level competition, in an attempt to showcase some of the problems that have been sticking around in Mythic Plus dungeons for a while. Do you feel like the majority of those issues have been fixed or addressed?

Daniel: It's tough to ever really blame Blizzard for five-man [dungeon] bugs, because you've got players that are going in there trying to find everything they can break and break it as fast and as hard as they can. So I'm sure from a developer point of view, it's gotta be super exhausting.

In a raid encounter, you're typically in one room. There are only so many enemies and only so many mechanics that can be dealt with. So the amount of things that can sort of go wrong or be exploited are contained. But you get these five-man dungeons, which are sprawling, and there's all kinds of different interactions that mobs can have. In a five-man, there's all kinds of crazy things you can do with stealth and death skips. To stay on top of that as a developer is pretty much impossible.

Newman: Are you one of the players breaking whatever you can find?

Daniel: I try to do my best. I try to find the ways the dungeons can be broken, as much for ways to use it myself as to figure out ways that I think other teams would use it and that I don't want it to be used. Then if I can find those things, I'll try my best to get those in front of Blizzard.

I know there was in Freehold a mob that cast a spell that would cause all the enemies around him to start taking massive damage. We figured out that that worked on bosses, too. So you could just tag this enemy and drag him around from trash pack to trash pack and let him cast his spell, and everything would melt. Then you could drag him onto bosses and do the same thing.

So I did it once on stream just to demonstrate what it was, and then sent that clip over to one of my buddies at Blizzard and said, "Hey, this needs to be taken care of." Sure enough, within I think three or four days, the mob's spell had been changed dramatically and it was no longer an issue. I have connections at Blizzard that I can report those things to on an individual level. I don't know that the average Mythic Plus player has that same avenue for getting things addressed.

Daniel: I do feel like the huge sort of game-breaking things have been addressed pretty well. A lot of times there's just a difference in opinion of which things are considered sort of bugs and which things are considered features.

I know one of the big things I disagreed with last expansion was in Black Rook Hold. There was a pretty famous mage exploit where you could routinely spellsteal off one of the mobs and the mage could start doing 400% more damage. They could drag the mob through the rest of the dungeon and keep spellstealing and keep doing insane damage the whole time. The first time I saw it I was like, "That's stupid, that needs to be nerfed." From what I heard from some folks at Blizzard, the developers were in love with that. They thought that that was super cool that there was a mob you could drag around and spellsteal, and they were like, "No, no, we're keeping that because we think that's actually a really neat interaction." I was like, "You gotta be kidding me. This is so broken."

So sometimes you just have that, where there's a thing that's kind of in that gray area, and some of the player base is like, "That's stupid, that needs to be nerfed," but the developers think that it's something that's fun and they wanna keep it.

Newman: What are some of the things that you hope will change or improve or involve as Mythic Plus play advances over the remainder of this expansion?

Daniel: This is one of those things where I don't know what teams are responsible for what at Blizzard. But I suspect that the amount of man-hours devoted to balancing and tuning raids compared to balancing and tuning Mythic Plus is skewed heavily in favor of raids. I feel like a lot of the balancing that gets done in the game right now gets done with raids in mind first, like class changes.

Maybe this isn't true. Maybe I just have bias on this. But I feel like every class change that's been made on BfA so far has been made because of something in a raid. Either the class was doing too much damage in raids, or not enough damage in raids, or something with raiding in mind. Then any effect that it had on Mythic Plus was just sort of incidental.

There are a few changes so far that I feel like maybe were inspired by Mythic Plus, like some of the nerfs to blood [death knights]. But I feel like there's a lot of classes in Mythic Plus that are clearly probably too good, or clearly really bad, and I feel like Mythic Plus doesn't have a seat at the table yet.

Newman: What other improvements would you like to see?

Daniel: I guess I'd like to see going forward more of the feeling that Mythic Plus is its own legitimate endgame content. One of the common things that people have asked for is seasonal rewards, like the mounts, the titles, the transmog that exists for raid and PvP, which sort of signals it as endgame content. Mythic Plus doesn't have any of that yet, and I don't know that there's been any indication that that's coming. When you don't have those things, it's not necessarily that it's a huge deal, but those are the traditional sort of things that indicate that "Yes, this is a thing that matters in World of Warcraft. This is a thing that people should care about."

Newman: Do you feel like the audience is there?

Daniel: The second MDI, in our match against exceL's Angels in the finals, I know that the Twitch channel was over 100,000 viewers just for the primary Warcraft Twitch account, with however many other tens of thousands watching on the foreign language channels. I think there were hundreds of thousands of people watching on whatever the Chinese broadcast was. Comparably, I think there was an Arena tournament that had happened a few weeks before that, and I think the highest that broadcast had gotten was 40,000.

So in terms of the numbers for MDI viewership compared to Arena viewership, yeah, I think that absolutely the audience is there. I think five-man is the most natural sort of unit in an MMO. Every one of the MMO games has sort of that party that's probably anywhere from four to six people big. I think that's foundational to the MMO genre. So I think that Mythic Plus captures that sort of stereotypical MMO feeling.

Every MMO has this experience of running around with a group of your friends. I think that's showing in the numbers of the MDI viewership. Even without a whole lot of support necessarily or tradition or hype around it, the MDI has still produced fantastic numbers viewership-wise. I feel like it's both because of its ability to appeal to casual players with not needing to find big groups, and not needing to spend a lot of time in it. I think it's the most accessible part of World of Warcraft these days. I think that if it was given the same level of attention that raiding and PvP were, that going forward, it would be by far the most popular format of high-level gameplay in World of Warcraft.

I’ve been a gaming journalist for more than 25 years. Get my stories by email at https://goo.gl/MTGRAJ or follow me on Twitter @gbitses for the latest news about PC games, virtual reality games, and Blizzard Entertainment. My work has appeared in outlets including USA Today...